WHEN I ENCOUNTERED THIS WORD – palimpsest – I had to look it up. I particularly liked the figurative meaning: something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. *(Footnote) It occurred to me that it could be applied to an ostomy person. We have certainly been altered, our plumbing that is. Yet we still are the same person as before, just struggling to accommodate our new physicality. An ostomy is a bit more drastic than a nose job but not as dramatic as a heart transplant. The best part is that it keeps us going, sort of like getting a new transmission in your aging car. It’s just that the exhaust comes out in a different place. Still, just speaking for myself, the surgery didn’t cause my other mechanisms to stop working, although it did apparently have a negative effect on my kidneys. But my legs still worked well, and I managed to father two lovely daughters. My horn always works pretty well too.
*Gore Vidal titled his memoir ‘Palimpsest’ where the word essentially became a metaphor for revisiting one’s past imaginatively. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life," Vidal says, "while an autobiography is history."
